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Thank you for making the active board. I agree with you about the pawn promotion, i.e., promoting to Prince should be allowed. I will see if I can edit that. The only AI issue I noticed was pawns can move 2 initially in the AI, but in the rules they do not have an initial 2 move option.
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jan 22, 2023 11:56 AM UTC in reply to Gary Gifford from 02:03 AM:I fixed the Pawn move in the Diagram, and added Prince to the promoChoice. (Now indicated by the letter M to distinguish it from Pawn.)
I think promotion to Prince is an improvement, because 2M vs N or 2M vs M are general wins (when stalemate is a win), while any other combination of two pieces cannot beat a lone N or M. So the advantage of a single Pawn can now be enough to force a win. And a lone K is already enough to beat a lone desert piece. So this should remove most of the drawishness, if there ever was any.
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Tue, Feb 28, 2023 04:02 PM UTC:A most interesting game. It inspired me to come up with a game with a similar mechanic. It took a while, but I've finally managed to come up a worthy variant, called Shuka.
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If the Princes are not royal, then why should these not be available as promotion choice? It would certainly be helpful in reducing the alleged drawishness of this variant. Kings are very efficient in chasing Ferzes and Wazirs to their doom; I don't think Knights can do that as easily. The desert pieces have a weakness in attacking pieces at the edge or in a corner.
That total extermination is a win condition that is often difficult to achieve is mainly caused by the participation of powerful pieces. The pieces in Desert Pub Chess are all quite weak; the Prince is probably the strongest in the end-game, and we know from Chess that a bare King is easy to checkmate (and then will get captured, if the game would not end at checkmate).
The article doesn't specify what the game result is in case of stalemate; I configured the Diagram to make that a win. After all, losing all your pieces is just one way of being stalemated. The Diagram limits the number of captures in one move to four.